The worst that can happen, is a strong backlight, rendering the front subjects in dark shadows, and everything else in the background overexposed and burned out in highlights. This is especially true in street photography, you cannot relocate your subjects (I advice not to do so, but if you must, feel free to practice your own style), you cannot change the available light situations. Yet, some subjects are worth shooting despite the crappy light: interesting character in a portrait, which I have encountered so often.
Therefore, I would like to share how I deal with difficult lighting conditions when I am out doing my street shooting, especially when it comes to strong backlight. Kindly take note that these are my own shooting preferences that fit my personal photography style, they may not work for every one.
1) Expose Your Subject. Ignore The Rest
In uneven, challenging lighting conditions, you must be very clear of what your main subject of the image is. I always emphasized on that particular subject and made sure that the metering on that subject is correctly exposed. I basically tuned the exposure compensation, and worked with the WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) live view, or through electronic viewfinder to judge the exposure. I can forgive an overexposed background, as long as my main subject, usually a portrait of a stranger, is in neutral and balanced exposure.
2) In Extreme Backlight, Play With Silhouette Effect
There are times the backlight is so strong that all you get is shadow figure in the foreground, which is not necessarily a bad thing. Creative play of highlight and shadow can bring interesting results. Using the extreme backlight to your advantage, you can purposely throw your main subject into dark shadow, creating a silhouette output which can yield desirable outcomes too. Not everything needs to appear perfectly balanced.
3) Black And White Works Well With Uneven Lighting
Converting an unevenly lit image into black and white can often change the overall presentation of the image altogether. High contrast black and white images work well with images having strong light sources, and the burned highlights and deep shadows added much needed grittiness to the images, especially when it comes to street photography. I am in no way implying that you can salvage a badly exposed image by turning it into black and white, no, if the image is bad, it will be bad regardless the color or monochrome presentation. In some harsh light, black and white can provide an alternative look that could prove more exciting than full color reproduction.
Silhouette Works With Strong Backlight
Black And White Complements Harsh Light And High Contrast Scenarios.
4) Shoot in RAW and Use Highlight/Shadow Recovery
If you are a RAW shooter, you should know how much details you can actually recover from the burned out highlights, or from the deep shadows during post processing. If you are a JPEG user, when you encounter such extremely difficult lighting, you may want to start to consider the advantages of shooting RAW. I am not asking you to ditch JPEG. In difficult circumstances, RAW can actually save lives, and it would be foolish to ignore the full potential of your camera. Any modern camera these days come with RAW shooting capabilities, which record and store far more information in the image file, that can be pushed and pulled during post processing. Simple sliding of highlight and shadow sliders in post-processing software of your choice can make a huge difference.
JPEG image, with overblown overexposed background
RAW image, same shot from previous JPEG, but processed, with simple highlight recovery
I acknowledge that there are numerous methods out there, some rather effective to counter backlight, or uneven lighting. Using large reflectors can balance the subject against harsh background. Also, a popular use of fill in flash can also mitigate faces in deep shadows. Alternatively, there is the ever-frowned upon HDR technique, which, honestly, if done correctly and tastefully, can give you some impressive results.
For some of you newcomers to photography, I sure you found some of the tips here helpful!
Really interesting. My problem is I don't use post production and this affects the quality of my work. Nowadays, everyone is mostly into lightroom for PP needs, but I use only GNU/Linux, so no Lightroom here. Darktable and similar open softwares have very few resources for guides/manuals and learning by doing, alone, can be very frustrating. I understand, though, that post production is a mandatory step in order to improve your work, as it was developing and printing pictures in the good old days. I think there's some laziness to overcome for me here... I always appreciate your blog posts, as they give me some good starting points for rethinking my approach to photography, too. Thank you.
ReplyDeleteIf you can use an Android device, there's a free program called Snapseed that let you work on jpg with basic functions for recovering highlitning/shadows, clarity, contrast, etc... It works quite well and is a middle way between having to pay for a prog and not having a prog at all.
DeleteTry downloading GIMP. It's a free download, works with GNU/Linux and does most of what Photoshop does.
DeleteI think his point is not the lack of freeware, but the manuals on how to use it. However Darktable does have a manual. You can download it from your repository list. If thats not good enough, literly just search youtube. On youtube you will find videos on how to do everything.
DeleteDarktable, ufraw, gimp, lightzone are all available for linux and free and amazing pieces of software.
Hi Mauro,
DeletePost processing is a part of digital photography workflow. However, I also understand that some people prefer not to do any editing at all. I cannot argue with personal preferences, but if you are willing to give it a try, I am sure you will discover that there are plenty of things you can do with post-processing and it can open up more possibilities in your photography.
And thanks to Andrea, noory and David for the suggestions! I was about to suggest Snapseed myself, as I use it frequently on my smartphone.
Mauro, as a long time Darktable user I can tell you that the manual and blog articles are very good and there are many tutorials on youtube too, for example: https://www.youtube.com/user/harrydurgin or https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCt6U6IJ2myOToBFeVL-EaXA
DeleteAnd it is not much different from Lightroom so I often get ideas from LR videos. It just take a little time and practice, like any other tool.
Mauro, I use only GNU/Linux as you do. Darkatble is a great tool, that I quickly learned to use thanks to the excellent Open Source Photography course of the fellow GNU/Linux user (and professional photographer) Riley Brandt: http://lessons.rileybrandt.com . The course is not free (but not too expensive) and if you visit Riley's YouTube channel you should find a promo code to get a discount. Once you learn the basics from Riley, you can easily follow the advanced material like Harry Durgin's YouTube channel. Anyway, I do 99% of my post processing with what I learned from Riley's course.
DeleteRobin, you have nor mentioned adding fill flash to deal with strong backlighting. Would you comment on this?
ReplyDeleteHe did mention fill flash a bit in his second to last paragraph. Most of his examples are related to street photography though where fill flash isn't ideal. In street photography you often want to be somewhat inconspicuous so as not to alert your subject, and thereby affecting their natural expression.
DeleteI acknowledge that fill flash can help but I usually shoot with available light. Thanks Jeffrey for adding your comment, it is true that I want to maintain that natural expression! You got that spot on.
DeleteHi Robin, I was interested in your comment about shooting RAW. I use an Olympus Stylus 1 and have started shooting in RAW and JPEG at the same time with this camera. For the most part I am just using the JPEG images, however I use the RAW images when I didn't get the exposure or white balance correct. The question that I have is what software do you use to do the corrections. I have been using Olympus Viewer for a number of years but have started to experiment with Adobe Camera RAW. I find that I get better and larger images with OV. What is your experience?
ReplyDelete... Fred
If I may give a suggestion, I have an E-M1 and used many times Olympus Viewer that gives very good results but is quite clunky and slow, so I bought Lightroom and now I use only that... but YMMV...
Deletehi Fred,
DeleteI used to recommend Olympus Viewer 3, and have stopped doing so, since it is extremely slow and a pain to work with. Lightroom is a good place to start and honestly any post processing software is fine!
Hi Robin, my first comment, and thank you for your excellent blogs. In fact I bought the Olympus OMD10 Mk2 on the basis of them and I left my Canon at home on a recent month tour of SE Asia. The Olympus performed very well. The Canon gathers dust although it has also performed well in the past, but the Olympus plus 45mm 1.8 (among others) is a fine combination, and much lighter. I found one drawback in that I have been using Adobe Camera Raw in Elements 11 to post process. But it does not support the `orf files out of the OMD10 Mk2. No, you need the later version of Elements for that. They have you. So, I downloaded a number of trial versions and tried the Olympus Viewer 3 and came to the conclusion that I much prefer ACR for ease of use, effectiveness and efficiency. What to do? Well I found a program called MetaRaw for approx. $45 Aussie dollars - far less than Lightroom or Elements. I downloaded the free Adobe Bridge and import to that. A single click on the photo takes me into ACR. It works well for me. You can trial it for a couple of weeks. I have no affiliation to MetaRaw. Keep up the great work Robin and best wishes for your future.
DeleteHi Robin - excellent tips there, especially for newbies. I absolutely love # 1: expose for the subject and the heck with the rest ;-)
ReplyDeleteThe "harsh light B/W example" is perfect use of B/W and proper exposure of the subject - rendering a very powerful shot.
Talking about powerful: all my best wishes of course with your career move! Knowing you and your amazing talent (just a fact) that was a brilliant move, and I am sure we shall read all about it, and see the fantastic results as well.
Interesting that you're working with 35mm perspective, as well. I think I know why, but I'll keep my big mouth shut, LOL. All will be revealed in due time, I am sure.
Keep up the good work, Robin, keep that shutter clicking and producing that amazing signature look of yours. I love it, and so do enormous numbers of others too. Bravo!
Hey Andre,
DeleteThanks for the kind words, and thanks for the well wishes. I also hope that this career move will work out, and I shall do my best. Surely, photography and shutter therapy goes on and that shall not change.
Robin, great work.
ReplyDeleteHowever I find your highlight pull from Raw actually takes away from the subject. In the jpeg photo I am drawn to the subject on the left. But in the raw converted one the subject becomes the person in the hallway in the right, as that is where my eye is drawn.
I actually prefer the jpeg interpretation.
hey David,
DeleteI am with you on this, the JPEG has a more natural look. however, this will not sit well with 99% of the people who pixel peep and will cringe at the slightest sight of highlight blown outs.... so....
Another excellent article. Glad to see you back focusing on photography itself. While every person has different likes and dislikes, it is important to understand the basics of light and imaging. I love working with Olympus RAW files to to recover details. Like you, I now use Lightroom, but used Aperture when it was supported. There are many other good software imaging programs out there, and can't knock any of them, but Lightroom has been intuitive for me and of course I like its DAM (Digital asset management) aspect for keeping my files organized. Having used many software programs though can't really knock any of the major ones. I do like Lightroom's support for certain plug-ins though that I occasionally find useful. I find photoshop overkill for my purpose and while I have access to it, I maybe use it once or twice a year. Most of all I just love to see you back out and shooting again.
ReplyDeleteHey David,
DeleteThanks for the kind words. I do not use Lightroom, I am still using Olympus Viewer 3, and have been experimenting with Capture One Pro.
Of course, shooting is important, and that will not go away. Shutter therapy goes on!